Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Halloween Dinner Party... on a Budget.


I've always loved Halloween, but in Australia it's not really a big thing... depending what part you live in I suppose!

I'm my old neighborhood when I lived in Sydney the whole neighborhood went all out and it was a blast. But when I moved to a little beach town on the central coast we had doors slammed in our faces and people yelling at us that 'We weren't American' a bit of a blow to little kids but nevertheless it was always fun to dress up and hang out with friends.

I've always wanted to have a halloween party and that hasn't changed even though I'm an adult now. So I wanted to host a Halloween event but alas all my friends were busy with uni so I thought I would just be good and start my diet early and ignore Halloween this year.

But then after moping around for a while I thought 'screw that' and decided to host a little dinner party for me and my mum haha. I didn't really have much else to do and I really really wanted to decorate and bake my witch cupcakes.

I was on a tight budget, since I'm poor and the only Halloween related item I had was the above jack-o-lantern candle I bought for fun a few years ago. So the only thing I bought for my Halloween part this year was the ingredients for the food and some black cardboard and some straws... I had such a blast thinking up things to make.


I'll start by saying that I'm no artist, I suck at drawing... but I like to think I'm creative and with Pinterest for ideas and inspiration, this is what I came up with!

I had a lot of black tissue paper because of numerous orders from the lovely T2Tea here in Australia, so I put it to good use to use as a runner on our dining table (underneath the pumpkin candle) and i made tissue flower balls as you see above.


I also used two jumbo tissues to make the ghosts and drew some eyes on them with permanent markers. Not hard at all and I think they turned out super cute!

I also made a bunch of spiders with the cardboard, once again they aren't anything fancy but came out decent enough to please me! I drew their eyes with a normal lead pencil.

I cut out some ghosts on paper and permanent marker for the eyes once more and put them around the table.

The big bat I also made with cardboard and that was the tricky part for me, since I suck at
drawing... it took me a while, but what I ended up doing was trace one side to my satisfaction then I cut it out, folded it over the uncut side and traced it to get the bat above! Then used a hole puncher to make eyes that i could use to tie it to the fan. (It ended up looking a bit like Zubat from pokemon lol)

I did the same to make a cute bat to stick on our wine glasses. (which came out looking really dirty on this picture, but they are clean from the dishwasher... I swear! >_<)

Luna, my monster dog also dressed up for Halloween... I couldn't resist. While I was a big fan of Sailor Moon when I was younger, okay  still am. Luna wasn't named after Sailor Moon's Luna. I'm just obsessed with the everything to do with stars and moons and always wanted a black dog named Luna haha. But maybe it did originate from Sailor Moon... who knows!


For dinner I cooked up some Monster Meatball Pasta... honestly I suck at making actual food look pretty, unlike baking... but my inspiration and most of the recipe came from here! as you can tell mine is nothing in comparison but still looks creepy! In all honesty I dont really think boiled eggs and asparagus goes well with pasta, but maybe thats just me! (ignore my overcooked pasta and eggs)

You can't see the meatballs, but I made them from scratch and they turned out amazing, usually the cheese in store bought cheesey meatballs always fall out when I cook them, but the ones I made only a few started to leak out when I was done and were amazing! I cut up some mozzarella into squares and popped them in! Might do a future recipe on them another time because they were so good!


I saw this great witch cupcake on pinterest from better homes and gardens which inspired me to make my own version!

My cupcakes are Vanilla with Cream Cheese Icing! (You can find my recipe HERE)

What I did: I bought the straws from eBay and cut them into thirds for the witches stockings and instead of using cardboard or paper to draw boots I used chico lollies! (you could use black jelly babies if you don't have chico lollies - they are basically jelly babies but chocolate flavour) and then cut a tooth pick in half and attached it to the baby and popped it in the straws!

Sadly I didn't have any black cupcake liners, so I used dark green to compensate for the witches dress!

And so that was my Halloween Dinner Party on a budget! I had fun making everything and look forward to doing something better next year!

-Kate xo

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